"If the laws of real estate are location, location, location, for me it's story, story, story. My style is colloquial. It's the way we tell stories to one another. My favorite books are actually very complicated - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ulysses. But my own style - we just tell a story."

The concept album, Black Ribbons, will see King provide the voice of late-night talk show host Will O'The Wisp as he gives his final broadcast before being cut off by government censorship. While his character rants about the apocalyptic future that lies ahead for America, he plays songs from Jennings's band Hierophant.

Jennings told music sites that although he had never met King, he knew the author was a fan -- King mentions the musician in his novel Lisey's Story -- and felt he would be the perfect narrator for the album. "To this day I've never met or spoken to Mr King," he said. "Someone who had business contacts with him put us in touch and I presented my ideas to him. Through a string of emails we went back and forth about the character and the story of the album, and then a few weeks later I had a recording of several voiceover clips -- called "The Last Night of the Last Light" -- on my doorstep."

Jennings said the experience "was like a digital correspondence with a spectre from the other side -- very dark, eerie and profoundly mesmerising stuff. I'm extremely grateful and honoured to have him on this record." King said he had "been a huge Shooter Jennings fan from the very beginning, so I was flattered to be asked".

Danny, he said, was certain to have been left "with a lifetime's worth of emotional scars" after his experiences at the Overlook, where his father was possessed by the hotel, tried to kill him and his mother and eventually died.

How Danny deals with both his nightmarish experiences and the clairvoyance, or "shining", which saved him, might make "a damn fine sequel", King said, according to local Toronto news website the Torontoist. His vision of the book -- tentatively called Doctor Sleep -- sees Danny now aged 40, working at a hospice for the terminally ill in upstate New York. He is apparently an orderly at the hospice, but his real work is to help make death a little easier for the dying patients with his psychic powers -- while making a little money on the side by betting on the horses.

Playboy has a perhaps surprisingly strong literary background, publishing works by authors including John Irving, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood. This summer, literary editor Amy Grace Loyd acquired first serial rights in Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished novel The Original of Laura for its December issue. It has also enjoyed a lengthy relationship with King, interviewing the author back in 1983.

"The protagonist of Salem's Lot, a struggling young author with a resemblance to his creator, confesses at one point, 'Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night, I make up a Playboy Interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.' Ten novels and several million dollars in the bank later, your books are big on campus and everywhere else," the interviewer said to King.

The author replied that the passage reflected his state of mind in the days before he sold his first book, Carrie, when nothing seemed to be going right. "When I couldn't sleep, in that black hole of the night when all your doubts and fears and insecurities surge in at you, snarling, from the dark -- what the Scandinavians call the wolf hour -- I used to lie in bed alternately wondering if I shouldn't throw in the creative towel and spinning out masturbatory wish fulfilment fantasies in which I was a successful and respected author. And that's where my imaginary Playboy interview came in," he said.

Stephen King's opinion may drive a stake through the heart of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. In an interview with USA Weekend, the bestselling author compared Meyer with J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. According to Stephen, "Both Rowling and Meyer, they're speaking directly to young people... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."

*****

"People are attracted by the stories, by the pace, and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual."

He further explains, "A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like, the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet."

"Ghost Brothers of Darkland County," a new Southern Gothic musical by Stephen King, the horror writer, and John Mellencamp, the musician, is to open in April 2009 at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone Mr. Mellencamp said that if the musical, about the reverberations of a tragedy in small-town Mississippi, did well in Atlanta, it would head to Broadway.

Author Stephen King was mistaken for a vandal when he started signing books during an unannounced visit to a shop in Australia, according to local media. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said staff at the Alice Springs book store did not initially realise the writer was autographing his own novels. Bookshop manager Bev Ellis said: "When you see someone writing in one of your books you get a bit toey [nervous]. "We immediately ran to the books and lo and behold, there was the signature."

Ms Ellis later approached the author at a nearby supermarket and said he was "very nice, charming". "Well, if we knew you were coming we would have baked you a cake," she told the writer. The prolific author, best known for works such as Carrie, The Shining and Misery, signed six books including his most recent novel, Lisey's Story. Most of the books will be given to local charities, though one was purchased by a customer who was in the store with King.

Ms Ellis added that it was common for authors to visit the shop, check if their books are on the shelves and sign some copies. "If they're not on the shelves, they'll ask about them. It's embarrassing if we haven't got their work," she said.

"There's no formula for what I do," said King, who added that if he tried to analyze and formulate his approach to writing, he might loose his touch. Still, the author admitted his break-neck writing pace has slowed in recent years. "There was a time, when I was working on "The Stand," when I really was a lot faster because none of the gears seemed to stick together." "That's a young guy thing - and besides, my priorities changed."

King also took a swipe at best-selling author James Patterson, famous for penning thrillers like "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." "I don't like him, I don't respect his books because every one is the same."

Need a good scare (as opposed to the bad ones you get every day)? A new Stephen King thriller appears in its entirety in the July issue of Esquire, due out today. King's "The Gingerbread Girl" is a 21,000-word novella covering 23 pages. "Over the last year, we've been trying to breathe life back into magazine fiction," Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger said Monday in a statement. "The best way to do that is to publish nothing other than event fiction." He means long stories by people you've actually heard of.

According to Esquire, "The Gingerbread Girl" tells "the story of Emily, who flees to the secluded Vermillion Key off of Florida's coast after the death of her infant child. Her new neighbor also enjoys the privacy of the key, but the women he brings with him never return home." They check in but they don't check out. Kind of like a roach motel for people.

"If I know anything, I know scary," King emailed. "And giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying. Thankfully, this national nightmare is one we can end with—literally—a wake up call.

"My friends at MoveOn.org Political Action are organizing pre-Halloween phone parties this weekend, Oct. 28th & 29th....And since it's almost Halloween, we'll celebrate with an optional costume contest, some pumpkin carving (I'll be making a Jack-Abramoff-O'-Lantern) and—of course—plenty of candy."

There's a mystery about creative writing, but it's a boring mystery unless you're interested in this one small animal, sometimes quite vicious, that makes its home in the bushes. It's a scruffy little thing with fleas and often smells of whatever nasty mess it's been rolling in. It can never be more than semi-domesticated and isn't exactly known for its loyalty. I'll speak more of this beast -- to which the Greeks gave the comically noble name musa, which means song -- later, but in the meantime, believe me when I say there's little mystery or tragic romance about the rest of it, which is why they never show the working part in movies about writers, only the drinking, carousing and heroic puking in the gutter by the dawn's early light.

Dig this: The so-called "writing life" is basically sitting on your ass.

There is indeed a half-wild beast that lives in the thickets of each writer's imagination. It gorges on a half-cooked stew of suppositions, superstitions and half-finished stories. It's drawn by the stink of the image-making stills writers paint in their heads. The place one calls one's study or writing room is really no more than a clearing in the woods where one trains the beast (insofar as it can be trained) to come. One doesn't call it; that doesn't work. One just goes there and picks up the handiest writing implement (or turns it on) and then waits. It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again. Other days it darts across to the waiting writer, bites him and then turns tail.

"I am excited to announce that on the evenings of August 1st and 2nd, I will be reading with the creators of Potter and Garp at Radio City Music Hall. This came about because two good people agreed with me that it might be possible to do one gigantic reading to benefit two charities. One is Doctors Without Borders an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries, The Haven Foundation, a charity that supports writers and artists who can no longer support themselves because of accidents or illness. We are doing this at Radio City Music Hall because it is the biggest, brightest venue we could find and we are hoping we can fill it on both nights. We hope to see you there--this is going to be very cool!"

Author Stephen King hates cellphones and won't use them. "They're 21st-century slave bracelets," he said in an interview from his home in Florida late last week. But tomorrow, Mr. King's marketing team plans to send text messages on his behalf -- to 100,000 cellphone users. On Jan. 24, the Scribner imprint is publishing Mr. King's new novel, "Cell," about apocalyptic havoc wreaked by cellphones. To promote the dark tale, Scribner has devised an elaborate Web- and cellphone-based marketing campaign.

Scribner will give Mr. King's fans the opportunity to buy ring tones of his voice. Selling ring tones is a popular avenue for making money in the music industry. It hasn't previously been tried in the book business because the idea of a novelist's voice droning from your mobile wouldn't seem to have much mainstream appeal. Mr. King, however, is one of the few writers with enough of a following to give him a shot at making it a viable enterprise.

*****

"Cell" tells the story of a mysterious pulse, sent to every operating cellphone, that incites many who hear it to go on a murderous rampage. A small percentage of the world's population remains unaltered -- they call themselves "normies" -- but their future is very much in doubt.

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The veteran horror writer says he got the idea for his new novel while watching a beautifully dressed woman standing outside a New York hotel, talking on her cellphone. What would happen, he wondered, if she suddenly received a message telling her to kill people? "I cruise the landscape, looking for things that would make people nervous," he says.

To Owen King, 28, this reflects a desire to cut his own path and see his work accepted or rejected on its merits. But an even stronger motive, he said, is to dispel any assumption that he is writing in the same genre as his father.

"I don’t think it’s fair for Stephen King fans to be deceived, and I know I’m a Stephen King fan," he said in an interview outside the Bangor Public Library. "The last thing I want to do is to present something as ‘Stephen King, Part II,’ and have it be something that’s a big disappointment."

He considered using a pen name, but was put off by the idea of going by an alias when meeting people or having a go-between handle details of his professional life. The prospect seemed too complex and too weird. ....King acknowledged that his book is grabbing more attention than would a first-time effort by a writer without comparable lineage, but he seems to have made a conscious effort not to capitalize on his father’s fame.

"I think the model that I look at is someone like Jakob Dylan, whose dad is obviously every bit if not more famous than mine," King said. "He’s a guy who sought to build a career on his own, doing something that’s a little bit different than what his father does."